More and more we're hearing about parents who outsource when
it comes to junior. From potty training to teaching their child
to ride a bike, moms and dads are ever more frequently turning
to the pros, according to a raft of recent news stories.

Now the hottest growing trend
may be inviting the experts into your home to do your "baby-proofing"
for you. I actually remember hearing that such experts existed
when my oldest of four kids, now 11, was a baby. At the time,
the notion was taken as sort of urban folklore, up there with
the guy who got a fried rat - instead of fried chicken - in his
take-out food.

But in recent years such businesses
have really taken off.

The basics of baby-proofing,
of course, include putting cleaning products on a high shelf,
securing kitchen drawers, putting medicines in a locked cabinet
and so on. Now, presumably the parents and parents-to-be who
are finding, hiring and spending many hundreds of dollars and
sometimes much more to have someone come in and tell them to
install gates at the tops of stairs, are among the most affluent
and educated of moms and dads.

Do they really not trust themselves
to figure some of this stuff out? Do they not have trusted friends
or know experienced parents who can walk through their house
and say, "gee, better make sure that wobbly bookshelf is
anchored into the wall"?

Sheesh.

Not that my own parents couldn't
have used a few tips. My mother thought it was a fine thing to
allow her five young kids to get into empty boxes at the top
of the stairs and so ride down to the bottom. My father liked
to pile us onto the toboggan on a snowy winter night - then attach
it to the back of the car and race around suburban streets with
us until we fell off of it. (My parents were really fun, but
I sometimes wonder if maybe they weren't trying to get rid of
a couple of us.)

I digress. Look, if a few incredibly
high-strung parents are willing to spend loads of money to bring
an "expert" in to tell them to cover electrical outlets,
fine for them. (I do mind when these experts try to convince
parents to do ridiculous things like measure the radiation coming
from their microwave ovens, as a Wall Street Journal article
on this trend reported.)

But when so many parents are
convinced by the "experts" that they can't effectively
baby-proof their own home properly without an expert's guidance,
we have a problem. Because these are likely the same parents
who increasingly seem to believe they can't raise their baby
without an expert's guidance either. And so these moms and dads
graduate from professional baby-proofing services to professional
parenting services. Never mind just absorbing every latest "child-perfecting"
technique in that month's parenting magazines - now, personalized
"parent coaching" is a new and very high growth business
too.

(How did we ever raise kids
without the experts? And anyway, after a century of conflicting
"expert" advice, can anyone really argue today's kids,
or parents, are better-off? Sigh.)

Steve Weinstein, head of the
Royal Baby Safety Corp. in Summit, N.J., told the Journal that
in 1991 when he started his company, the term "baby-proofing"
was a new one to most people. Now, he presides over a trade association,
"The International Association for Child Safety Inc.,"
which has 130 member companies.

Look, these parents want to
do whatever they can to protect and nurture their kids. That's
a fine instinct. If dropping a few - or many a hundred - bucks
makes them feel they've gone the extra step for their baby, well
okay, it's their money. If they want to survey what the experts
have to say for some insights, then apply their own common sense
to such things, well good for them, too.

But I fear that too many parents
today don't believe that if they really want to be a blessing
to their children over the long term, they have to see that,
professional baby-proofing or not, what their child really needs
over time is a parent's handling - not an expert's.

Betsy Hart is the author
of "It Takes a Parent: How the Culture
of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids - and What to Do About
It."
She can be reached at www.betsyhart.net